is no more taxed than in the usual occupations of men, but the constructive imagination, which is generally unemployed in the tasks of term time, is actively aroused. There is, moreover, a wide difference in the attitude of the student towards his work in the two kinds of schooling. In the class-room tasks his lessons are generally learned from books, he is tied to print; in laboratory work he deals with natural objects, and finds in his contact with them the quickening of spirit which to be conceived needs to be felt. My own experience with vacation schools shows me that ordinary students may, without suffering any tax upon their vitality from the increase in their intellectual labor, year after year devote six weeks of the summer vacation to hard work in natural science schools. I do not think that it would be profitable to most youths to give this additional time to the study of subjects which they pursue in their ordinary term-time work; the vacation tasks should be in another part of the intellectual field. The student who devotes the body of his time to literary works should resort to summer schools of science; he who is engaged in science study during term time may profitably engage in literary work during a part of his vacation.

As soon as our vacation schools become generally as well organized as they now are at Harvard College, men and women will have an opportunity which has not yet been afforded them for continuous training of a literary and scientific kind. Except at Harvard the summer schools are of a scattered and incomplete character, there being no effort to bring the various departments into satisfactory accord. In that institution summer schools originated, and have gradually taken the shape which indicates their place in our system of education. Twenty years of experience and experiment have resulted in the following scheme of vacation teaching in that institution. The sum

mer schools are not under the charge of any faculty; each department, generally each instructor, being responsible for the conduct of the teaching in the particular school. A committee appointed by the corporation has a general oversight of the work; it determines what schools shall be taught and chooses the instructors. Schools have been begun in eight departments of study: in the natural sciences, botany, chemistry, geology, physics, topography, and physical training; in French, German, and Old Norse. In the departments of chemistry, geology, and topography the instruction is divided into elementary and advanced classes. The total number of courses which may be pursued, each requiring the whole time of the student for the term of teaching, is thirteen. In all of these studies except the languages, the student pursues his work in the laboratory or the field under the immediate supervision of the instructor; he does no ordinary class work, but follows his inquiries in an individual way. The work continues throughout the day, without interruption except for the noonday meal. The result is a good "soaking," to use Agassiz's word, in the class of thoughts which belong to his particular study, and an intimate acquaintance with the teachers with whom his work is done. At the end of four or six weeks of such continuous labor, the pupil is generally fairly well imbued with the elementary methods of the science to which he has given his attention.

So far the most general resort to these classes has been on the part of teachers and students who purpose to become instructors. For teachers such schools afford peculiar opportunities for advancement; by attendance on them they secure some contact with the conditions of a university. Although it is the va cation period of the college, the libraries and museums are kept open during the session of the summer schools; moreover, there are lectures, open to members of

all the schools, in which the teachers of the several departments set forth their views concerning the methods of education which should be pursued in their several specialties. Thus, though the relation of these summer students to the university is slight and temporary, it is not without value to discerning teachers who desire to know the range of their art. These vacation schools also afford valuable opportunities to the students of the smaller colleges, who may desire to obtain some knowledge of the larger schools of academic grade. It is an evil in our American collegiate system that young men who resort to the higher institutions of learning spend the whole of their college time in one school, and become thoroughly acquainted with but one set of instructors, and know only one of the many diverse motives which prevail in these academic systems. In the present condition of our colleges, we cannot hope to create the habit of passing from one seat of learning to another, which is so common in Germany, and has such a beneficial effect on the university students of that country. If that habit of migration is ever developed in our college students, it will probably be due to the opportunity for its development which summer schools afford.

Another valuable result arising from the extensive resort of students to vacation schools consists in the opportunity they afford the student to shorten the period of his academic preparation for the more serious tasks of professional study. The most of our teachers who have attentively considered the problems of the higher education are convinced that the four years' course of our colleges is too long for those who propose, after its completion, to pursue a training for any professional career. The result of this double system of VOL. LXIV. NO. 386.

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higher education in colleges and professional schools is that our young men come to their life-work at the age of at least twenty-five years to find that their more scantily equipped but younger competitors have the precedence. They need a portion of their youth for the struggle which awaits them in their battle with life; they cannot afford to give too much of that hopeful time to the task of equipping themselves for the combat.

As much as we may regret the delay of taking up the work of the world which our long academic training forces upon us, it is not easy to see how the quantity of the instruction required of the college student can be reduced without a decided lowering in the standard of intellectual culture, by no means too high, to which we now bring young men. The only evident way of gaining time in the academic course is by the use of the vacation classes for those studies which can be pursued in those periods. Harvard College is, in a tentative way, trying the experiment of allowing study in the vacation time in lieu of term-time work: in its scientific school the student is allowed to reduce the curriculum of four years to three by a proper use of the instruction given in the summer schools, and in the college the summer field courses in geology are reckoned in with the term work.

The rapid development of summer students in this country shows us that our educators are seeking to meet the evils incident to our long school vacations. It is an evidence of their good sense that they have not sought to better our school system by decreasing the vacations usually allotted to pupils and teachers, but have endeavored to find another and safer method of obtaining the desired result.

N. S. Shaler.

THE philosophic study of history teaches that heretofore among mankind no obstacles have been so hard and so slow to be overcome as differences of race accompanied by differences of language and religion. In colonizing this hemisphere there were two currents of immigration thus distinguished, which may be termed Latin and Saxon: the latter flowing chiefly from England, with Holland participating in some but small measure; the former flowing chiefly from Spain and Portugal,' with some participation from France. In modern times, one of these has been reinforced by a great immigration from Germany, and also by an immigration from Ireland, which, though incongruous in race, has been so long assimilated to the Saxon in language and social principles and habits that it is not inharmonious; and the other, in like manner, has been reinforced by a vast number of immigrants from countries bordering on the Mediterranean Sea, particularly from Italy.

For two centuries after the Discovery it was continually doubtful whether the Latin current would not monopolize the New World. Near the close of the next century, the withdrawal of France from the contest, surrendering Canada and ceding Louisiana, fixed the predominance of the Saxon current in the northern continent. During the following half century this predominance was confirmed by the acquisition of Florida and the spoliation of Mexico by our re

1 For convenience, in this article, no distinction will be made between what issued from Spain and what from Portugal. They will be treated as one in fact, as they were one in substance, and as in fact during a long period of the greatest activity of Spanish colonization Portugal was a Spanish possession. Brazil is an empire trembling on the verge of division into three or four republics. This division and

public; and the last fifty years (completing the fourth hundred from the Discovery) have, in the minds of many of our people, assured the destiny of the Saxon not merely to predominate in North America, but to monopolize it.

It is under these circumstances that the great overshadowing Saxon power of the north has summoned the Latin powers of the south to a conference in the Saxon capital; and they have obeyed the summons with such deluding courtesy that an idea has got into vogue that it is possible to unify them with us in a commercial and political confederation, tributary to our interest and our pride, and antagonistic to the European sources from which all parties to the alliance sprang.

The purpose of this brief article is to incite consideration whether this idea is not a mistake, and whether, unless we are very prudent, the outcome will not more likely be an increase of the dread with which the Latin powers of the hemisphere naturally and reasonably regard us at heart, however specious their profession of respect and friendship. That the conference is not merely commercial in its purposes is manifest from the fact that no European nations possessing American dependencies are bidden to it, although our trade with Canada and with Cuba exceeds that of all the invited participants together.

Some of the foundations of the mistake consist in neglecting the teachings

organization would have happened early in the century but for the immigration of the royal family of Braganza. Spasmodic efforts for it have been made repeatedly since, and few publicists doubt that soon after the death of the present respectable Emperor (now far advanced in his sixty-fifth year) they will be renewed and with success.

of history already mentioned; ignoring the jealousy with which the modern representatives of the proud race that long was ascendant in the New World regard those by whom their race has been distanced in the competition; misconstruing the quality of their republican government, and interpreting it by ours; overlooking the radical differences between their frame of society and ours, which spring from their union of Church with State, and from the fact that their relation to the Indian population is still by inheritance that of conquerors to subjects, though no longer that of masters to slaves; underrating the keen and selfish intelligence of their ruling classes; failing to comprehend the Oriental fineness and unscrupulousness of their diplomacy; in short, misunderstanding the Latin-American character, and omitting to know that it conceives itself to have a career independent of ours.

The Spaniard preceded the Englishman by a hundred years in occupying America. Long before King Charles First of England granted the Massachusetts charter Spain had girdled the whole of the southern continent and the Gulf of Mexico with colonies, and her possession of the West Indies and the Isthmus secured control of transportation between the oceans, and already she had conceived the project of uniting their waters by a canal. Her precedence in organization was much longer than a century; for during the first fifty years of English colonization there was little attempt of the Mother Country to dictate a political system to her emigrants, and meanwhile the Spanish colonial dominion was systematized by a long line of astute and able viceroys and audiences under direction of the Council of the Indies. In the arts of social life, save so far as they were suppressed or repressed by that direction, Spanish precedence was even more distinguished. While the English colonists remained

villagers, whose only public streets were the cow-paths and whose only public parks the cow-pastures; whose climax of luxury in religious edifices was a wooden barn with a steeple of the same material, and to whom, as late as the middle of the eighteenth century, Faneuil Hall was a structure of unrivaled splendor, the Spaniards were founders of cities, laid out with a skill which modern experience has not improved, adorned with vast and solid works of architecture for civil and religious uses which command admiration when tried by the best modern standards, supplied with aqueducts, decorated with alamedas, and often fortified with the greatest military intelligence and the most lavish expenditure. For examples of magnificent cathedrals, those of the cities of Mexico, Puebla, and Lima remain unsurpassed in the New World, and manifold more money was spent by Spain on the fortifications of her galleon port of Carthagena in New Granada than our country has appropriated to those of the port of New York. The advantage of climate and soil also was enormously on the side of the Spaniards. Four fifths of their American domain lay within the tropics, and much of it where the heat of the latitude was tempered by the height of the land, so that its natural products were of every variety; while the English domain was limited to a strip of wilderness on a comparatively sterile northern coast. Of the disparity of the two domains in mineral wealth, and in its development down to the recent era when coal and iron superseded silver and gold in values, there is small need to speak; for greed of the monetary metals was the notorious motive of Spanish dominion, as is familiar to every child. There was nothing in the English colonial possessions to warrant such titles as the Land of Flowers or the Silver River, nothing to impel a search anywhere within their boundaries for the Fountain of Youth or for El Dorado. Another

had was in the character of the Indian populations whom they subjugated and enslaved in the West Indies and Mexico and Peru, or adopted and tamed into willing workmen, as in Paraguay. With small exceptions, none of the natives whom they encountered were implacably savage, like those of the northern wilderness. In the viceroyalty of New Spain, and even more in the viceroyalty of Peru, they were so far civilized that they became an immediate help to the conquerors, while the sparse and uncontrollable aborigines who confronted the English settlers were an unmitigated hindrance. The pictures drawn by the historian Prescott (who never visited the countries he described) now are confessed to be touched with fancy, but there is enough of truth in them to demonstrate the intelligence of the labor of the millions who were subjected to the repartimientos, encomiendas, mitas, and other devices by which the Spanish colonists enriched themselves. Nor, in enumerating the constituent parts of their dominion, should the ghastly fact that it was sought, acquired, and administered under the authority and auspices of the Church ever be omitted. Spanish priest and Spanish soldier were inseparable companions, and shared the spoils on terms nearly equal. The tithes for the religious establishments were collected with an exactitude surpassing the collection of the king's fifths. The monuments of clerical wealth so amassed are still the most conspicuous features of all the Spanish settlements from California to Chile; and the division was, on the whole, an equitable one, for the priestly influence over the enslaved population was the strongest security the conquerors had against an insurrection of numbers which bore an even greater proportion to theirs than the natives of Hindostan do to their resident British rulers and army.

It would be easy to enlarge upon the

lish colonization. The subject tempts into dramatic detail. But enough has been said to illustrate them for the present purpose, and to suggest with what feelings the heirs of the one which was so far in advance must contemplate the present ascendency of the other. For the Spanish-American aristocracies who are represented in this conference at Washington are indeed heirs of the glories of Old Spain as our democracy is of the glories of Old England, — heirs of the Roman Empire and the Kingdom of the Visigoths, of the Omayyad Caliphate of Cordova and its Moorish successors, of the splendors of Charles Fifth and gloomy majesty of Philip Second, and of the remembrance that but for the barrenness of an English queen our Mother Land might to-day be a possession of the Spanish Crown. Limited still in South America, save in the Argentine Republic, to almost as scanty settlements back from the coast as a hundred years ago, never acquiring the energy or the numbers necessary to occupy the vast interior, they have beheld the Saxon current in the north sweep from ocean to ocean, and develop into the most powerful nation on the earth, with intelligence generally diffused among the people, with agriculture perfected and industries diversified, with manual labor invested with full political rights and privileges, and with Church absolutely dissociated from State; while five sixths of their own population remain ignorant of letters and incapable of intelligent suffrage, with agriculture positively deteriorated from the times of the Conquest, without manufactures, with little inland transportation save by the natural water-courses, with manual labor despised, and with the Church still so dominant in politics that in a majority of the Latin republics the free public exercise of any but the official religion is prohibited by their constitutions.